The modern consumption-driven society, the density of the population coupled with industrialization and advancement of technology results in producing waste, hazardous and non-hazardous. Hazardous waste is dangerous or potentially harmful to our health or the environment, while non-hazardous waste (garbage) consists of everyday items we use and then throw away, such as product packaging, bottles, food scraps, and newspapers. Nearly everything we do leaves behind some kind of waste.
The awareness to the environment and the possible ecological damage amplified the importance of waste handling as an increasingly important environmental and aesthetic issue for households, corporations, municipalities and nations, promoting the agenda of “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle”. The 3R's presents the waste hierarchy aiming at different desirable outcomes of waste management. The aim of the waste hierarchy is to extract the maximum practical benefits from products and to generate the minimum amount of waste.
The high consumption of single-use bottled beverages, especially the growth rate in consuming plastic water bottles, present a huge environmental problem. Even though recycling programs exist, the recycling rate is extremely low causing about 80% of the plastic containers to end up in the landfill.
In practice, the recycling process presents difficulties and the scope of its contribution to environment is unclear. Large quantities of plastic containers, especially plastic bottles, are not recycled. Recycling is a regulation-based solution not necessarily profitable and may be considered economically unjustifiable causing more pollution. When compared to other materials like glass and metal, plastic polymers require greater processing (heat treating, thermal de-polymerization and monomer recycling) to be recycled. Furthermore, the chemical properties of the plastic bottles, in particular the raw material of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and the high ratio of its volume to weight, add to the complexity of the recycling process. Public pressure urges manufacturers to search for “solutions” which are both economical and socio-environmental.
Several devices currently exist to facilitate improved re-use of plastic containers or plastic bottles as raw material for building and forming multi-purpose structuring.